Search the Gothic BibleBETA

The engine does not do full-text search. It simply scans Streitberg's readings verse by verse and tries to match strings, across word boundaries. In other words, if you look for etun ‘they ate’, you'll also get fretun ‘they devoured’ and praufetuns ‘prophets’ – unless you select one of the word-based matching modes, or use regular expression syntax to anchor search patterns manually.

Pattern matching

Regular expressions provide a powerful and precise method for searching text. The syntax may seem complicated, but writing expressions is actually quite easy once you know the basics. (They tend to be harder to read.)

[aeuio]

matches one character out of a set of characters (in this case a vowel)

[a-zþ]

idem, with a range of characters and one additional letter

\w

matches any word character

\W

matches any non-word character, i.e. punctuation, witespace etc.

\b

matches a word boundary

.

matches any character

a|bc

matches a OR bc

*

repeats the preceding character or group 0, 1 or more times

+

repeats the preceding character or group 1 or more times

?

repeats the preceding character or group 0 or 1 time, i.e. makes it optional

{n,m}

repeats the preceding character or group at least n and at most m times

You can create complex expressions by grouping basic expressions in parentheses, just like you would build arithmetic expressions using numbers, parentheses and the + and × operators:

(a|b)c

matches ac and bc

(a|bc)(x|y)

matches ax, ay, bcx and bcy

The operators *, ? and + are quantifiers. They indicate how many times the preceding character (or group) may be repeated:

There are many more things you can do. Have a look at this comprehensive overview if you want to know the details. Below are a few examples to get you started.

Examples

Most of the examples operate in default matching mode and use \b or \w to simulate word-based searches. Alternatively, you can select a word-based matching mode and simply enter the word pattern you want to find in words, or at the start or end of words.

Finds proper names with u-declension. (Remember that regular expressions are case-sensitive by default. Conveniently, Streitberg's text only uses capitals for names and chapter initials. (There seem to be some exceptions though.))

Finds repeated words. Literally, the expression reads ‘one or more word characters between word boundaries, captured as a group, followed by one or more occurrences of space followed by the first captured string between word boundaries’.

Known limitations

The search engine only scans Gothic text. You won't get results for John 1:1, Wulfila, dative, Christ, Streitberg, Codex Argenteus etc. (Use Google or another search engine for these.)

It scans the text as edited by Streitberg, including marks for additions <...> and deletions [...]. As these may occur within words, you will occasionally miss results that you would expect to find. (We are working on a more sophisticated engine that looks in different views on the text.)

It is not yet possible to look for headwords or to filter on grammatical tags in the database. (However, thanks to Gothic's rich inflectional morphology, you can get quite far by filtering on endings and other morphological features, as shown in the examples.)

The engine will abort when a query takes too long. We have to set a limit to protect the server against denial of service attacks with maliciously crafted expressions. (Because of the way regular expression matching works, foul expressions could literally run for days.) If you get a warning, try to use a more simple or alternative expression.

Similarly, queries that yield many results (e.g. looking for a single letter or any word) may be refused or truncated. Given the small size of the corpus, we prefer to have all results at once, without paging. (This is convenient when you want to copy/paste results.) But there are better ways to download the entire text than entering an expression that returns every line in the Gothic bible.

Last but not least: this is a beta version. There may be unexpected glitches. Drop a note when something goes wrong or can be improved, or when you come up with better examples.

Provided by Project Wulfila 2004, University of Antwerp, Belgium.
Last modified on 2015-09-29
by TDH.